Dawnkeepers

“No.” This time the word was little more than a broken sound, a sob that hurt Anna’s ribs as the burning power drained and the images faded. Eventually she became aware of her surroundings, aware that she was in a conference room with the door open, and there were people passing by in the hall.

New grief tore through her at the realization that the safe security of her “normal” job was as much an illusion as her “happy” marriage. She’d forsaken her brother and the responsibilities of her royal blood in order to be a regular person and be married to the man she loved, yet that life was coming unraveled just as the Nightkeepers were reconnecting.

Fate, she thought. Destiny. There are no coincidences. This was the gods’ will, their way of punishing her for turning her back on her duties, their way of reminding her where she belonged.

“I give up,” she said to the gods as her heart cracked into a thousand pieces, each sharper than the last. “You win.”

She crept to her office, moving slow, feeling sore. Grabbing her purse, she headed for her car, a four- year-old Lexus that Dick kept wanting her to trade in for something newer and shinier. Once she was on the road, she turned away from home. Or rather, she turned away from the home she’d made with her husband and headed toward the one she’d grown up in. The one hundreds of people had died in, though she had survived, a small piece of her always wondering why she’d been spared and other, better, more dedicated Nightkeepers hadn’t.

Sometimes the phrase the will of the gods didn’t even begin to cover it. But, she thought through a sheen of tears as she hit the highway and put the hammer down, Skywatch was a stiff fifteen- hour drive away. Maybe by the time she got there, she would’ve figured out what the hell she was doing with her life, and why.

After the thoroughly weird moment when Alexis had come out of her statuette-induced fugue, Nate shut himself up in his three-room suite in the residential wing of the mansion, ostensibly to get some work done for Hawk Enterprises. That was bullshit, though: first, because he was making zero headway on Viking Warrior 6 and had been for some time, and second, because his real motivation had been to get the hell away from the crowd and away from Alexis’s puzzlement.

She’d been looking at him the way she had right after they’d broken up, like she didn’t know what’d just happened, or why.

Sure, he’d given her a reason back then—several of them, in fact, starting with, “It’s not you, it’s me,” and ending with, “My life is too complicated right now to start something serious.” All of which had been true, as far as it went, but it hadn’t begun to touch on the reality, which had been more along the lines of, “You scare the shit out of me,” and, “I want to make my own choices and can’t get enough distance from all the crap that’s flying around in our lives right now to figure out if we’re good together or just convenient.” He’d just told her it was over, and hadn’t let her see that the decision tore him up, made him mean and surly, not because he’d known it was better for both of them that way, but because it sucked knowing she was a few doors down the hall and he’d given up the right to knock. Hell, he’d not only given it up, he’d taken it out behind the woodshed and shot the shit out of it, all in the name of free will. Goddamn it.

None of which explained what’d happened with the Ixchel statuette, he reminded himself when a low burn of lust grabbed onto his gut and dug in deep. And the here and now was what he should be concentrating on, not what’d happened in the past.

What the hell had Alexis seen in the barrier? Obviously he’d been in whatever vision she’d had, and from the way she’d been looking at him he had to figure it’d been a sex fantasy. Which meant . . . ?

Damned if he knew, but as far as he was concerned, it changed nothing.

“So stop thinking about it and get the hell to work,” he muttered, glaring at his laptop screen. The storyboard for Viking Warrior 6: Hera’s Mate had been three-quarters done on the day Strike had shown up at Hawk Enterprises, asked Nate about his medallion, and given him his first taste of magic.

Now, because he’d dumped a bunch of shit out of the middle, the game was less than half-finished, and he wasn’t sure he liked what was left.

Hera was a goddess and a hottie, a leader of her people, a magic user and a prophet. She deserved—

hell, demanded—a mate who was worthy of her, and one who could kick ass just as well as, if not better than, she could. The gamers needed a strong, interesting character to get behind, and Nate needed to give her a fitting match. And yeah, maybe—probably—he was projecting, but so what? He was the boss. He could get away with crap like that, as long as he produced.

Right now, though, he wasn’t producing. The hero that his head story guy, Denjie, and his other writers had come up with originally had been a solid character the gamers would’ve liked well enough. Problem was, Nate didn’t think Hera would’ve given him the time of day; the dude had been an idiot, with a vocabulary of approximately six words that weren’t swears.

Hera, for all her ass-kicking prowess, had a spiritual side as well.

So Nate had taken over the project and blown up the guy’s story line. While he was in there, he’d morphed the hero from blond to dark, and taken him from meat-head to something a little more refined. He’d ditched the guy’s name—who the hell thought Hera would fall for someone named Dolph? Please. He’d put Hera and Nameless together, let them fight it out a little, and then, just when things had been getting good and the two of them were teaming up to go after the main bad guy . . .

Nate had stalled.

He knew what ought to happen next, what the storyboard said should happen next, and it sounded like a pile of contrived, cliched shit.

“Get a grip on yourself,” he said to himself, or maybe to the characters that lived inside the humming laptop. “Contrived, cliched shit sells; it’s a fact of life. The gamers aren’t looking for originality; they want something that looks familiar but a little different, something challenging but not impossible. You’ve done it a hundred times before. What makes this any different?”

He didn’t want to look too closely at himself to find the answer, and damn well knew it. Which was why, when there was a soft knock at the door to his suite, he was relieved rather than annoyed, even though he had a pretty good idea who it was going to be: his winikin coming by for another round of This Is Your Life, Nate Blackhawk.

Sure enough, when he opened the door he found Carlos standing in the hallway.

“Hey.” Nate stepped back and waved his assigned winikin through the door. “Come on in.” He didn’t figure he could avoid the convo, so he might as well get it over with. Maybe they could even get a few things settled. Or not.

Carlos was a short, stocky guy in his mid-sixties who wore snap-studded shirts, Wranglers, and a big- buckled belt with the ease of someone who actually was a cowboy, rather than just pretending to be one because the clothes were cool. His salted dark hair was short and no-nonsense, and his nose took a distinct left-hand bend, either from bulldogging a calf or losing a bar fight, depending on which story Nate believed.

On his forearm Carlos wore the three glyphs of his station: a coyote’s head representing his original bound bloodline, the aj-winikin glyph that depicted a disembodied hand cupping a sleeping child’s face, and a hawk that was a smaller version of the one on Nate’s own forearm. If either Sven or Nate died, their glyphs would disappear from the winikin’s arm in a flash of pain. That was a sobering thought, as was the realization that back before the massacre, each winikin had worn one glyph for each member of their bound bloodline, in numbers so large the marks had extended in some cases across their chests and down their torsos, reflecting the might of the Nightkeepers.

Now each winikin wore a single bloodline mark, aside from Carlos and Jox, who each had two.

Carlos had escaped the massacre with his infant charge, Coyote-Seven, and stayed on the move as t he winikin’s imperative dictated, making sure the young boy remained safe from the Banol Kax.

Eventually, they had wound up in Montana, where Carlos had changed Coyote-Seven’s name to Sven and taken a job as a ranch manager. Eventually he’d married a human woman and they’d had a daughter, Cara. By the